Happy Highway Freedom Weekend (it’s summer, let’s go!)
By Robert Bradley Jr. -- May 25, 2013Over at Center for American Progress (and Climate Progress), where oil production and oil consumption are considered bads, Memorial Day is not a welcomed time. And so their holiday-weekend message is that oil is not a good buy (it is more expensive thanks to the policies CAP/CP advocate), and “Big Oil” is a culprit. Here is their spin:
Beginning with the Memorial Day weekend and throughout the summer, Americans will spend their hard-earned dollars traveling to visit family, friends, and the great outdoors. Meanwhile, Big Oil will be making huge profits off of these travel expenditures on fuel, while at the same time fighting for decreased public health and climate-change protections.
At MasterResource, we celebrate the beginning of the peak driving season knowing that our free-market philosophy is about energy abundance and affordability. And there is little to apologize for.
Oil, gas, and coal have been/are being technologically transformed into super-clean energy resources. Carbon-based energies are growing more abundant, not less. And energy/climate alarmism is losing steam on all fronts.
The real energy sustainability problem is statism, not free consumer choice. As Matt Ridley recently concluded: “There is little doubt that the damage being done by climate-change policies currently exceeds the damage being done by climate change.”
Energy is the master resource. Motorized transportation is freedom-of-movement. So, like the Shell commercial says, Let’s Go!
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Coal and oil are not fossil fuels. They are in too high of an energy state for biological materials. The hydrogenated carbon of fossil fuels is high in chemical energy, while biological materials include much oxygen, which is lower in chemical energy. There is no means of increasing the level of chemical energy but radiation. Heat and pressure will not do it. They act upon nuclei, while chemical energy is in the motion of electrons which spin around nuclei. Nothing can be done to nuclei which will increase the motion of electrons which spin around them short of a nuclear reaction. It means physicists don’t know what chemical energy is.
Hydrocarbons would have been created at the very beginning of the earth’s formation. A few decades ago, scientists assumed the earth originally had a reducing atmosphere, but there has been a lot of drift in scientific thought over the past few decades, which is in fact the only reason why global warming came to the surface.
When oxygen combined with the volatile hydrocarbons, water and carbon dioxide would have been produced. The oceans would have been formed as a result. No other realistic explanation has been produced for the source of water on earth. There was apparently a delay in the oxidation of hydrocarbons, and it was probably a result of oxygen being initially tied up as sodium perchlorate. This solid would have allowed much more oxygen to exist than would have been possible with O2 gas. Perchlorates are quite unstable and would have continued to breakdown into O2 and NaCl, as the hydrocarbons were oxidized. This is undoubtedly why there is so much NaCl in the oceans.
Gary Novak
Independent Scientist
http://www.nov79.com
Great post Rob!
I’d love to see an ad campaign that drives home the point “when you buy gasoline you buy freedom”. (Of course that would be a waste of resources promoting a undifferentiated commodity product).
Can you imagine American culture without the Automobile (and Gasoline)? The Road Trip, the Sunday Drive… the Joads, Jack Kerouac, Chuck Berry, the Beach Boys, Bruce Springsteen to Wayne’s World throw in Easy Rider? Critics would note some irony in my citations, but they actually serve to underscore how fossil fuels and petroleum products have given us greater and more broadly distributed freedom than has ever existed in the history of humanity.
They also underscore Tom Wolfe’s great insight from the ’70’s of our vast prosperity and its widespread distribution. In fact much of our cultural angst is really a fear of losing it. It has driven much of our political rhetoric since 1970.
Good points JavTex ….
Positive messaging is the way to do … Energy freedom includes the freedom to move. “Happy motoring” needs a comeback!